Say When Read Free Page B

is the point of this, Griffin?”
    “Call me—”
    “No! I’m not going to call you Frank! I have always called you Griffin and I’m not going to stop now!”
    “Everything stops now, Ellen.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “You’ll see.” He turned over, closed his eyes, and, unbelievably, felt himself falling asleep.
    In the morning, Ellen hadn’t gotten out of bed. Griffin had gotten Zoe off to school, telling her that Mommy didn’t feel well. Then he got in his car and drove to his computer consulting firm. Same route as Friday. Same exact route. Same radio station. His life belonged to him.
     
    Evelyn knocked gently on his door. Griffin jerked his head up, pushed around some papers on his desk. “Yes?”
    She opened the door, stuck her head in, spoke softly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Griffin, I know you said no interruptions. But your wife is on the phone. She told me to tell you.”
    “Uh huh,” he said. “Okay.” He wanted his face to look normal. How did he used to look when she called? He smiled at Evelyn, nodded, and she nodded back, closed the door.
    He picked up the phone. “What.”
    “Meet me for lunch. We have to talk.”
    “Sorry, can’t.”
    “Yes, you can.”
    “No, I can’t. I have an important lunch meeting.” He did not.
    “Griffin, I don’t want to live with you any longer. We have to do something about that.”
    He looked out the window, saw the trucks going by on the nearby freeway. After they graduated from college, he and Ellen had hitchhiked across the country, a romantic tribute to the sixties. Griffin had even let his hair grow long and wore an old Army jacket. At one truck stop, a massively overweight but quite muscular driver who’d had too many beers took an instant dislike to Griffin. “What are you supposed to be?” he’d asked. “You a hippie?”
    “No, no—just a captain of industry like yourself, Slim,” Griffin had said, and the driver had gotten up and moved rapidly toward them, his fists clenched. They’d run out of the place, terrified, and then, when they were far enough away, fell down laughing. That night, they’d lain out in their sleeping bags looking up at the crowded stars in the Montana sky. “It’s so…big,” Ellen had said.
    Griffin smiled. “Yeah. That’s why they call it ‘Big Sky Country,’ Ellen.”
    She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “Sometimes when I see things like this, like how big the sky is, I just feel sad. I don’t know why.”
    Her voice had sounded so young, like a little girl’s. Griffin remembered the photo he’d once seen of her as a pigtailed seven-year-old, one braid twisted nearly comically away from her head, her bangs cut crookedly. In her eyes was a shyness, a soft vulnerability that had made him run his finger down the side of her child’s cheek, that had made his chest ache with his desire to protect her. Here was that child now, wrapped up in the body of a woman he’d decided he wanted to be with forever.
    He’d pulled her close to him that starry night, kissed her face everywhere. Three times they’d made love that night. Three times—under Venus, under Orion, under the filmy gauze strip of the Milky Way—he’d lost himself inside her.
    And now Ellen was standing in their kitchen holding the phone and telling him this impossible thing as though he would go along with it. Well, he wouldn’t. He would not.
    “I told you before, Ellen, and I will say it one last time. I am not moving. I am not going anywhere. Period.”
    “Well, fine, Griffin. Then we will as of this moment begin leading separate lives. Consider us…roommates.”
    “Right.”
    “And I have plans tonight. I will feed Zoe dinner early, and as soon as you come home, I will be leaving.”
    “Have a good time. What are you going to wear?”
    She hung up. He slammed the phone into the cradle and then picked up the picture of her that he kept on his desk. He removed it from the frame. Maybe it wouldn’t tear easily—maybe